Adventurous Much? A Third Of People Surveyed Admitted To Doing Things Just So They Could Post About It On Social Media

It’s the Ford Mustang’s 50th birthday! What does that have to do with social media? Well, as part of its publicity campaign for the Mustang and its status as an American pop culture icon, Ford recently conducted a survey about how often and why Americans do or don’t try new things; what it found was that almost 30 percent of those surveyed have done something so they could post about it on social media.

According to the The Atlantic, Ford reports that 29 percent of people surveyed responded affirmatively to the question, “Have you ever, even once, done something just so you could post about it on social media?” The respondents were about evenly split between having done this once and having done it multiple times.

The survey, which involved 1,000 adults aged 18 and older, “suggests Americans value adventure more than they demonstrate in real life,” according to Ford — basically a nice way of saying that people want to appear more bold and adventurous than they really are. The study found that 45 percent of the adults surveyed felt that their online friends and followers appeared more adventurous on the Internet.

In terms of actual sense of adventure, the survey revealed that 33 percent of men think they’ll be the first to try new technologies, as opposed to 25 percent of women; more women said that fear of failure held them back from trying new things (including experiences, not just technology). Overall, almost half of the survey respondents said they didn’t do new things because of a lack of money, while fear of failure was the reason for 27 percent and embarrassment was the reason for 26 percent.

It’s no secret that people carefully curate their online personalities to appear cooler and more exciting than they really are; however, now it appears that we’re actually tailoring real life and participating in experiences just to fit our desired online profile, and that’s a little creepy. However, Ford’s survey, although small, reveals a fascinating tendency to both exaggerate ourselves due to a desire to look good and hold ourselves back due to certain basic fears — so maybe it all evens out in the end.